Why design is important for venture capitalists

Organisations are turning to design thinkers to encourage innovation

The role of designers across organisations, be it in product or service-based companies, is growing significantly. Even venture capitalists (VCs) are investing heavily in design thinking. Design is nowadays considered as an important tool to identify flaws in a product or service. It has become a universal salve to diagnose and fix the product-service related issues.
 
According to a report titled “Design In Tech” by John Maeda, the mergers and acquisition (M&A) activity in the design space has increased globally in the last four years. From 2013 to 2016, 32 M&A deals were recorded by firms such as Facebook, Google, Deloitte, Accenture, IBM, Capgemini, Wipro, Ernst & Young and many more.

 
For the best results, start-ups and VCs are bringing designers at the early stage of their business and giving them a voice. They are getting them into the business to meet users, map their journey and brainstorm with managers and engineers to come up with innovative products.
 

Design has to be driven by empathy. Good design thinkers look at the world through the lens of empathy to effectively understand human needs and requirements. With a design mindset, they patiently need to listen to the needs of a project’s stakeholders and try to translate their vision into an appealing and profitable solution and help investors generate money.

 
Designers are tasked to find a connection between people and a product that empowers them in achieving a said task with a personal touch. It’s their empathy-driven approach that successfully connects the unconnected dots in the business and brings profit to investors and VCs.
 
Designing is all about delivering beautiful solutions or products with clarity, by eliminating ambiguity. And such clarity comes through numerous trials and errors. Successful designers experiment a lot and learn from their mistakes to quickly come up with a revised product or service version. To achieve this, design thinkers adopt an iterative design methodology instead of a traditional waterfall model. Iterative design technology helps design thinkers to quickly refine, clarify and beautify their work.

 
Today, a majority of businesses are redefining their strategies and business models to stay tuned with this hyper-connected world of social media. Therefore,  it is becoming imperative for every organisation to create meaningful trends that closely connect with people and help in generating profit for the investors. And a lot of companies are doing this by leveraging the skills and knowledge of their designers.
 
A good design thinker helps product engineers to look into the past performance and future prospects of a designed product. The designer helps them identify the strength and weakness of a product. Further, designers offer smart solutions to highlight the advantages of the product and eliminate the weaknesses by suggesting necessary changes in the product design.

 
Hence, it is no surprise that globally design-centric organisations are recruiting the world’s best design talent and putting them in charge of developing cutting-edge technology products. A good designer could truly be a great asset for VCs and investors and help them bring in more revenues into the business.